Get SAVED! All the popular kids are doing it!
We use these codified beliefs to make more clear who fits where; who is a potential threat? Who might destabilize the community? These statements, I believe, are reasonable realizations that should come from our study of organized religion. The movie SAVED! develops this idea as it presents what for many will be an unknown picture of the life within Christian schools. This community-within-a-community has its own customs, its own language, its own rites of passage, and its own ethic.
Get SAVED! All the popular kids are doing it!
If you can imagine a high school where it’s actually cool to be a holy roller, you probably aren’t going to appreciate the movie SAVED! If, like me, you went to a parochial school (whether it be Protestant or Catholic), this movie is going to strike a very deep cord, reminding you of memories you probably have long forgotten - and in some cases, conveniently so. Yes, SAVED! does employ its share of stereotypes; the stereotypical holier-than thou and perkier than a cheerleader-on-speed pastor’s daughter, the fall from grace of the “good” people, and the hypocrisy of those who hold themselves up as the ideal of morality. But through these stereotypes, real people shine through. It is convenient to forget that we all need and use stereotypes in order to relate complex stories of parts from human experience that seem consistent regardless of whether we are talking about your story or mine. In the movie SAVED!, the stereotypes serve an important role without making fun of the people being stereotyped. It is never easy to see a stereotype on the screen, read about in a book or hear vilified when we resonate with the stereotype being used. For those people who found the use of Christian stereotypes in this movie offensive, I encourage you to watch this again and ask yourself if you can empathize with the questions Culkin’s character is asking, with the teenage rebellion of his girlfriend, or of the moral mistake the main character makes. If you can’t relate to any of these characters, guess what, you’re probably Mandy Moore. Mandy is a beautiful character but she isn’t particularly sensitive and she has substituted Christian hyperbole for authenticity. This movie takes belief seriously, but it also takes seriously the reality of what I call “growing up God.”
I find I have a great sense of humor about just about anything other than the particular demographic to which I belong. The movie SAVED! takes some pretty hard swipes at a group to which I used to belong: the super-cloistered world of a fundamentalist Christian school. For almost everyone in this movie, the story ends well. For most of the people in the reality I grew up in, the story ended pretty badly. In the movie, the gay boy finds about his identity and is able to deal with it. In my reality, the gay boy found out about his identity and attempted suicide. In the movie, the questioning teenager finds out that her questions lead to an improved understanding of God and of her loving family. In my reality, the questioning teenager is ostracized, labeled a rebel, and loses all interest in religion. In the movie, sexual exploration for one person carries no damning punishment and for the other means an unwanted pregnancy but ultimately reconciliation and a deeper relationship with her family. In my reality, the most mundane of sexual exploration meant getting kicked out of the entire community you were within, losing familial relationships, and having to build your life over on the basis of French kissing. If anything, the movie ends more positively than my experiences with fundamentalism suggest they do and honestly, the brand of fundamentalism this movie is based on is pretty main-stream. The movie affords more latitude to the damage done by super-sectarian schooling than I think is reasonable. The story in the movie ends happily; but too many people enveloped in a fundamentalist experience can’t say the same thing. They find the answer at the end of a rope, the bottom of a bottle, or wounds so deep they never heal.
For those offended at the stereotypes used in the movie or by the audacity of the filmmaker to show a down side to the cloistered world of a church-school, let me encourage you to take a deep breath and realize that this movie isn’t made through the eyes of an adult. The reality of SAVED! is ultimately the reality as experienced by the kids themselves. The director and writer Dannelly is telling a story that, as it turns out, is his own story. The movie’s teenage perspective is easily explained when we recognize that for Dannelly, much of this story was his. I, for one, am deeply thankful for his work and his movie.
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About MysteriousFaith
“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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